Greece:

Euro,

Sovereignty

and

the

State

as

Challenges for the Strategy of the Left

(Full version of the intervention at the debate with
Frderic Lordon, April 2, 2015, EHESS, Paris, organized by
Penser lmancipation)

Panagiotis Sotiris
Introduction
The arrival of Syriza to power on January 2015, that is the first time
that a Party of the non-socialdemocratic Left arrived to power in a
government where the Left does not represent the minority of the
coalition is, obviously, a historic event, the opening of a new
historical phase, an indispensable message of hope for all the
subaltern classes in Europe. At the same time, this specific
conjuncture poses crucial challenges for the strategy and political
practice of the radical Left, in particular ion what concerns its
relation with the European Integration project, its strategy regarding
state apparatuses and its conception of internationalism. In this text
I will occupy myself with the following questions: a) The Greek
electoral earthquake of January 2015 as the result of a profound
political crisis and of an exceptional sequence of social and political
struggles, b) The neoliberal and disciplinary offensive of the
European institutions, c) the recuperation of popular sovereignty as
a necessary moment of a new internationalism, d) the necessity of a

confrontation with the State as the materialisation of class

strategies.

1. Greece at the crossroads: crisis of hegemony and

social struggles
This electoral breakthrough was the result of an historical sequence
without precedent. We had to go through the most profound crisis of
a model of growth and development that made manifest the
contradictions of the European version of neoliberalism and of the
Euro as single currency: a combination of uncontrollable debt, of loss
of competitiveness, of constant erosion of the productive base, of
self-destructive consumerism based upon a rise of private debt.1

In spite of the rhetoric surrounding the Greek crisis as an

exceptional situation, the 2009-10 crisis in Greece was not the
failure of the peripheral version of the European project; it was its
success, it was its truth. The answer to this profound crisis of
neoliberalism in Europe was to transform Greece into the terrain of
the biggest experiment on the possibility to impose, in an extremely
violent manner, a regime of capitalist accumulation that was based
upon the annihilation of all social gains and all labour rights, upon
the total deregulation of the labour market, upon the complete
1

As Stathis Kouvelakis has stressed the introduction of the euro led to boosting
the overall financialisation of economies internationally, bubbles of all kinds in
the periphery (especially in real estate, banking and credit-fuelled private
consumption), accompanied by export performances and gigantic lending flows
from the core. (Stathis Kouvelakis, The End of Europeanism, in Costas
Lapavitsas (ed.), Crisis in the Eurozone, London, Verso, 2012, p. xvii)

privatisation of critical infrastructure, of natural resources and of

public space, and upon a considerable transfer of revenue towards
the finance capital. This response has also been a test site for the
European authoritarian post-democracy, in particular with the case
of the first post-modern coup in the form of the Papademos
government, led by the former head of the Greek Central Bank.2

The result was a social disaster that can only be compared to the
consequences of the WWII: A reduction of GDP of almost 25%, an
unemployment rate which at the end of 2013 reached 27% and
which in 2015 is still at 25%, an mass flight of young degree-holders
that face a youth unemployment rate that still exceeds 50% and a
deterioration of all public health indicators.3

However, the Greek electoral earthquake was not simply the

consequence of social crisis. It was overdetermined by an almost
insurrectionary sequence of social struggles, including highly
original forms of political protests such the mass assemblies in City
Squares that created new forms of unity between the subaltern
classes, gave an antagonistic and radical sense to the notion of the
people as a collective subject of resisted, materialized the possibility
of a new historical bloc of the forces of labour, culture and
knowledge. It was this exceptional sequence that could explain the
2

On the concept of post-democracy see Colin Crouch, Post-Democracy, London:

Polity, 2004.
3 On the consequences of austerity in Greece see Nolle Burgi (ed.), La grande
rgression. La Grce et lavenir de lEurope, Paris: ditions Le Bord de leau,
2014.

intensity of the crisis of hegemony and the extent of changes in the

relations of representation and of the impressive discrepancy
between the political system and the aspirations of the subaltern
classes. It is here that we can find the roots of the electoral victory
of Syriza on January 2015.

2. The neoliberal and disciplinary counter-attack of the

European Union.
However, this hope is now being menaced by the perspective of a
humiliating defeat, which will be a message of desperation. Every
day we witness new forms of cynical blackmail exercised upon the
Greek government, which is now under the threat of financial
asphyxiation, because of the dependence of Greece upon credit and
liquidity injections from the ECB, but also because of the enormous
cost of servicing the accumulated debt towards the EU and the IMF.
Theres not a single day without the other members of the EU
demanding the imposition of new austerity measures and new
structural reforms, namely neoliberal capitalist restructuring. We
can no longer ignore the political calculation that consists in driving
the Greek government towards capitulation, a defeat aiming at
sending the message that it is impossible to escape the neoliberal
permanent state of exception, which has become the new
European normal.

If this defeat indeed happens, this will be the result of the incapacity
of a great part of the Greek Left, in particular the leading group in
Syriza to confront the question of political power and sovereignty at
the national level and the international level and in particular at the
intersection of the national and the international levels. These
important developments were not accompanied by a serious debate
on the question of the State and on the question of what it could be
done in the international context where the new Greek government
found itself.

In what concerns the international context you are well aware of the
situation. The Greek government has been the target of an extreme
attack from the part of the European Union. After an election where
the electorate obviously rejected austerity and neoliberal reforms,
the institutions of the European Union have tried to financially
suffocate Greek society in order to see the continuation of the same
politics. The European institutions take advantage of the budgetary
dependence of Greece, which cannot continue to finance its public
service, its salaries and its pensions, and pay its debt towards the
IMF and the ECB, without using the instalments of the loans
arranged under the bail-out packages and the liquidity injections
from the part of the ECB.

The aim of the institutions is to prove that no country can escape

the politics of austerity and the neoliberal obsession dictated by the

European Union. What the representatives of the EU want to impose

is not only the adherence to neoliberal or social-liberal policies, but,
mainly, to put in place a form of permanent disciplinary surveillance,
a process of constant evaluation based upon ultraliberal norms of
the political choices of the Greek government, with the authority to
bloc measures that they consider as a violation of the neoliberal
orthodoxy.

It is exactly this version of reduced and limited sovereignty that the

European institutions want to impose upon the new government.
The determinant aspect has not to do with the particular measures
but with the mechanism of imposing ad infinitum neoliberal
policies. In this sense, we have to not that this neoliberal counteroffensive does not necessarily take the form of a grand final
confrontation, of a moment of truth where everything will be at
stake, namely either rupture or definitive capitulation. We can also
expect a cyclical repetition of the government finding itself at an
impasse, being under pressure and engaging in new concessions
and new compromises and trying to invent new temporary
solutions in order win some time
.
It is exactly by means of this perverse mechanism that combines a
form of limited and ceded sovereignty, in particular in what
concerns social policies, and the imposition of a regime that
consecrate the unequal exchanges between the centre and the

periphery of the Eurozone, which is most aggressively manifest in

the negation of monetary sovereignty, that the European Union has
become the most brutal experiment not only with neoliberal
economic policies but also with the most advanced form of
contemporary disciplinary and authoritarian post-democracy.

The evolution of the forms of European governance represents a

vast experimentation with the forms of this limited sovereignty, this
new form of surveillance and this violent imposition of an ultraliberal
social model. The European Union, accompanied by the FMI was
ready to verse hundreds of billions of Euros on the condition that
Greece applied reforms, namely accepted the destruction of its
entire social infrastructure and put in action a violent change in the
relation of forces in favour or employers and the forces of capital. It
is exactly this that is happening today.

It is exactly this that is happening today in the negotiation of the

Greek government with the institutions, that is the infamous Troika.
The aggressive practices of the RU are not an exceptional choice. As
part of the permanent state of exception it is the normal
functioning of Europe. In this sense, we can talk, as Cdric Durand
et Razmig Keucheyan do, about a bureaucratic cesarism, a
cesarism that is military but financial and bureaucratic, 4 that
represents the organic crisis of bourgeois strategies and of the
4

Cdric Durand and Razmig Keucheyam, Un csarisme bureaucratique, in Cdric

Durand (ed.), En finir avec lEurope, Paris : La fabrique, 2013.

European project for the simple reason that the neoliberal bourgeois
strategy never managed to construct a historical bloc. It is equally
interesting to underline the observation of Durand and Keucheyan
on the fact that the contemporary hegemony of finance represents
exactly this pseudo-historical bloc. When the markets become the
dominant form of relations and of cohesion at the European level,
the authoritarian and punitive bureaucratism become the only
possible of governance.

In the context of a growing material discontent of European peoples

and the deterioration of the governability of national state
apparatuses, the inability o the European project to generate
consent has led to national and continental democratic institutions
falling into second place, The emergence of bureaucratic cesarism
is the only strategy that the continents elites dispose in order to
maintain their domination.5

This process is profoundly and fundamentally authoritarian and

antidemocratic. The declaration by Jean Claude-Juncker that there
can be no choice against European treaties 6 is a manifestation of
this anti-democratic cynicism that is enrooted in the institutional
tissue of the process of European integration.7

5Op.cit.,

p. 99.

6http://www.politis.fr/Juncker-dit-non-a-la-Grece-et,29890.html.
7On

the antisocial and antidemocratic character of the politics of austerity see

Armin Schfer and Wolfgang Streeck (eds.) 2013, Politics in an Age of Austerity,
Londres: Polity, 2013.

Democracy cannot be reduced to deliberation, or consultation, or

negotiation, or the pressure groups and the obsessive lobbying
(30.000 employees of the European Comission in Brussels plus
30.000 lobbyists), that the supposed democratic aspects of the
European construction. Democracy signifies the capacity of the
collective will of the subaltern classes to impose their political and
social exigencies. This possibility is being constantly refused in the
European context. The integrated Europe cannot be democratic
and the return of democracy in Greece requires the rupture with the
process of European integration.

3. The euro as capitals nationalism and the need to

recuperate popular sovereignty.
The rupture with this new European normal , the rupture with the
monetary, financial and institutional architecture of the Eurozone
and the disobedience to the European treaties become today the
necessary condition of a progressive and democratic exit from the
crisis and for the opening of new socialist perspectives in Europe. If
we take the example of the Euro: the exit from the Eurozone is not a
technical question of a choice between monetary options. The
advantage of return to a national currency is not limited to the
protection against the generalised social dumping and the structural
inegality of the Eurozone. Above all it is the recuperation of a
democratic control upon economic and social policy and the
necessary liberation from all the constraints and the forms of

intervention inscribed in the framework of the European treaties and

regulation concerning European economic governance.

In this sense, we have to say that today the question of sovereignty

becomes a class stake, a question around which we can see the
condensation of antagonistic class strategies. We do need a
democratic

and

popular

sovereignty,

as

recuperation

of

democratic and social control against the systemic violence of

internationalised capital. We are aware of the problems associated
with the notion of sovereignty, in particular its association with
nationalism, racism, colonialism. I can understand the fear of
confusion between a democratic demand and exigency and the
problem, in countries such as France, with the relation between a
form of republican sovereignty and colonialism, as well as the
current racism of the French State. However, I am talking about a
form of sovereignty based upon a different social alliance than that
of bourgeois sovereigntism. I am talking about an alliance of the
popular forces, an alliance based upon the common condition of the
subaltern classes, based upon solidarity and common struggle. As
Frederic Lordon has stressed: Democracy, popular sovereignty: the
same idea, which is that of a community mastering its own
destiny8.

8Frdric

Lordon, Ce que lextrme droite ne nous prendra pas, 2013,

http://blog.mondediplo.net/2013-07-08-Ce-que-l-extreme-droite-ne-nous-prendrapas

In this sense the recuperation of sovereignty becomes the condition

of a profound change in the relation of forces and represents this
collective and emancipatory effort towards another road, an
alternative narrative that points to the direction of society based
upon the potential hegemony of the working classes.
But what about nationalism? What we can do about nationalism and
the historic identification between sovereignty in the context of the
modern nation-state and nationalism? I would like to insist that we
can have a political conception or more a politically performative
conception of the nation. In this sense the nation is not the
imaginary community of common blood; it is the unity in struggle
of the subaltern classes, the unite of those that share the same
problems, the same misery, the same hope, the same struggles. The
nation is not a common origin; it is a common condition and
perspective. It is an antagonistic conception of the nation that also
demands a decolonialisation of the nation, as recognition of the
consequences of colonialism and state racism, the struggle against
all forms of racism within a potential alliance of the subaltern
classes.

Gramscis insistence on the importance of elaborating the nationalpopular will as element of a strategy for hegemony is in this sense
exemplary. For Gramsci, the modern Prince must be and cannot but
be the pro claimer and organiser of an intellectual and moral reform,
which

also

means

creating

the

terrain

for

subsequent

development of the national-popular collective will towards the

realisation of a superior, total form of modern civilisation. 9 In this
sense the elaboration of an alliance of the subaltern classes as a
redefinition of the national-popular element is in reality in opposition
to bourgeois nationalism:

Nationalism of the French variety is an anachronistic excrescence in

Italian history, typical of those who turn their heads to look back,
like the damned in Dante. The mission of the Italian people lies in
taking up once again Roman and medieval cosmopolitanism, but in
its more modern and advanced form. Let it even be a proletarian
nation, as Pascoli wanted: proletarian as a nation since it has
constituted the reserve army for foreign capital, since it, together
with the Slavonic peoples, has given the rest of the world a labour
force. Exactly on this account must it take its place in the modern
front of the fight to reorganise the world, including the non-Italian
world, which through its labour it has contributed to create, etc. 10

Frderic Lordon has offered a sufficiently provocative description of

this transformative and emancipatory conception of the nation, of
what we can call the new landscape of the nation

Here is the new landscape of nationality : Bernard Arnault ? Not

French. Cahuzac? Not French. Johnny et Depardieu who wander
around the world like a self-service shop for passports ? Not French.
9

Q13, 1, SPN, pp. 132-3.

5, FS, pp. 253-4.

10Q19,

The Mamadous and the Mohammeds that toil in sweatshops, that do

the work that no one else wants to do and pay their taxes are a
thousand times more French than this race of masters. The bluebloods of tax evasion, out! Passport and welcome to all the darkcoloured people are dwelling on this territory, those that have
contributed twice, by their labour and their taxes to collective life, a
double contribution that gives its own unique criterion to the
belonging to what, yes, continues to be called a nation! 11

I think that we have here the possibility to rethink the question we

usually

define

as

identity

but

also

an

answer

to

the

institutionalized racism of European states.

And this poses the question of internationalism. I would like to stress
that one of the most important problems, one of the signs of the
profound crisis of the European Left is the fatalist acceptance of
European Integration. This fatalist acceptance of the process of
European Integration as an inevitable development is, in reality, a
sign of defeat in face of the neoliberal offensive. The accusation of
social-chauvinism against all those that insist on the rupture with
the European project, the stigma attached to any defence of popular
sovereignty which is branded nationalist, the demonization of any
critique of the euro as a single currency, all point to the same
direction: a confusion between workers internationalism or popular
internationalism and the nationalism of capital.

11Lordon,

op. cit.

European Integration is not the perverse form of a cosmopolitanism

or internationalism; it is the actual nationalism of capital. The euro is
the nationalism of capital. It is the recuperation of monetary
sovereignty that represents s form of popular internationalism.

It is by no accident that although the European Union attacks all

forms of sovereignty that could be essential in the defence of social
gains, of union rights, of public services, at the same time it can
accommodate itself with all forms of nationalism, with the mass and
murderous exclusion of refugees and migrants, and with all forms of
discriminations at the national level. Within the European Union the
problem is not the democratic deficit; it is the void of democracy. It
is an authoritarian federalism without democratic legitimacy, a
neoliberal constitutionalism without any form of constituent power
outside the exigencies of employers and big capital.

We know that even within the radical left there are partisans of a
democratic federalism in Europe. Toni Negri and Ral Snchez
Cedillo have launched an appeal, some weeks ago. In it they
recognise the loss of sovereignty in the European context and they
affirm that the only solution now is a democratic federalism that
would transform Europe into a counter-power against Atlanticism
and neoliberalism12. However, the problem is that from the
12Antonio

Negri et Ral Snchez Cedillo, The new left in Europe needs to be

and
European,
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/27/new-left-europegreece-democratic-capitalism-nato.
radical

beginning of the process of integration, federalism represented

exactly the mistrust of European economic and political elites in
regards to popular sovereignty. As Cdric Durand has stressed, it
was Hayek himself that considered federalism as a restriction of the
forms of intervention from the popular social strata.

Therefore it is necessary to speak about a new internationalism that

begins with the rupture with the institutions of European Integration.
Today, being internationalist means to wage the collective effort to
break with the European construction, in order to recuperate
popular sovereignty, to open a new road, based upon the collective
struggle and intelligence of the subaltern classes. This process of
rupture, represents neither nationalism nor chauvinism, it would be
the return of democracy to Europe, the possibility to rethink
international cooperation and solidarity in terms of mutual benefit.

Capitalist transnational integration, of which the EU is the most

advanced example at a global level, does not exclude social and
political

antagonism,

political

confrontation,

imperialist

interventions, and war. The important contribution of classical

Marxist theories of imperialism was the insistence on the fact that
the international behaviour of States is determined in the last
instance

by

social

relations

within

each

social

formation.

Imperialism, aggression, antagonism are the expression of capitalist

relation, in particular in conjunctures of capitalist counter-offensive.

Therefore, peace and cooperation depend, in the last instance, upon

the relation of force and the social and political configuration in
social formation. Any hit against the EU today, every link that
romps with the chain, is a step towards a more democratic Europe.

4. The question of the State

However, everything depends upon the question of power, the

question of the state. In the Marxist theory and politics, there is
always a certain ambvalence.

On the one hand we know all the references to the necessity of the
destruction of the state, of a process of withering away of the state,
of a conception of emancipation as liberation from the state. This is
a rupture with the entire tradition of the political philosophy of
modernity in which the state is an instance that guarantees justice
and rationality in the social world.

On the other hand, we also find in the Marxist tradition a taking into
account of the importance of state power in order to begin a process
of social change, of a power that is even despotic as Marx stressed
in the Communist Manifesto where he refers to despotic inroads on
the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois
production, of the necessity to use the political supremacy of the
proletariat in order to to centralise all instruments of production in

the hands of the State, even if he defined the state as the the
proletariat organised as the ruling class.13

As a solution to this bifurcation between a profound anti-statism and

the necessity use state power, it was Marx himself that insisted on
the fact that the working class cannot simply lay hold of the readymade state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes. 14 tienne
Balibar has stressed this phrase as a form of rectification of the
Manifesto and as indication of the necessity of a new practice of
politics. For Balibar

1. The first condition is the existence, besides the apparatus of the

State, or political organisations of a new type, of mass political
organisations, of political organisations of workers, which control
the apparatus of the state [...]
2. But the second condition is even more important, because it
conditions the previous one: it is the penetration of political practice
in the sphere of labour, of production. In other terms, the end of
the absolute separation, which was developed by capitalism itself,
between politics and economy. Not in the sense of an economy
policy, which has nothing new, not simply by means of the transfer
of political power to workers, but in order for them to exercise it as
workers [...] the transfer inside the sphere of production of an entire
part of political practice15.
13

Karl Marx and Frederic Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, Peking:
Foreign Language Press, p. 57.
14 Op. cit. p. 2.
15 tienne Balibar, Cinque tudes de matrialisme historique, Paris : Maspero,
p.96.

Today, we face a profound transformation, a mutation of state forms

within contemporary capitalism. Despite the anti-state discourse of
neoliberalism and the politics of privatization and of deregulation,
the amplitude of forms of state intervention has increased. The
emergence of new markets in particular in energy, infrastructure
and public services such as education or health is accompanied by
new agencies of regulation, accreditation, regulated competition,
of guarantied revenue for private enterprises. At the same time we
have been able to observe the impressive enhancement of
repressive state apparatuses, with the creation of a parallel state of
surveillance and antiterrorist black ops. However, the change is
more profound was the internalisation of capitalist strategies in the
institutional tissue of the State, something already described by
Poulantzas, as an element of a general tendency of displacement
within the state apparatuses which make the executive much more
important in relation to legislative power: this is the primary aspect
of what Poulantzas himself had designed as authoritarian statism.16
The result is a reinforcement of these centres of decision against all
forms of intervention of popular movements: Authoritarian statism
also involves the establishment of an entire institmional structure
serving to prevent a rise in popular struggles17. Consequently:

16Nicos
17

Poulantzas, State Power Socialism, London: Verso, 2000.

Ibid, p. 210.

Popular demands come to have a more and more problematic place

in the elaboration of state policy: not only because the interests of
monopoly capital are furthered by such changes, but also because
the administrative apparatus is materially organized in such a way
as

to

exclude

popular

needs

from

its

field

of

perception.

Furthermore, the irrepressible shift in the centre of gravity towards

the state bureaucracy unfailingly involves a considerable restriction
of political liberties, understood as forms of public control over state
activity.18

The process of European Integration can be considered as a high

point

of

this

tendency.

The

bureaucracy

of

the

European

Commission, with its powers of surveillance, of blockage, of veto, of

negating financing, and of intervention, its relation with autonomous
centres

within

member-states,

exemplified

in

the

case

of

autonomous Central Banks, or Independent Authorities, represent

exactly this tendency. We can see this aspect as a manifestation at
the European level of what Poulantzas already had described as the
new strategic role of the state bureaucracy:

Thus placed under the authority of the Executive, the state

bureaucracy is becoming not merely the principal site but also the
principle actor in the elaboration of state policy. No longer is it a
question of striking political compromises on the political arena
that is of publicly elaborating the hegemonic interests in the form

18

Ibid, pp. 226-7.

of national interest. The various economic interests are now directly

present as such within the administration. 19

Consequently, it is impossible to simply use the state, the

apparatuses of the state as neutral instrument. The affirmation that
the state is not an instrument but the material condensation of a
relation of class forces, an affirmation upon which Poulantzas
insisted, does not signify that a simple change in the relation of
electoral forces can change the role and the function of state
apparatuses. We can also describe the state as a condensation and
materialisation of class strategies. In this sense, we can say that in
the case of a government of a party that is not a party of the state,
a systemic party, there can be (and this is more probable) a
contradiction and antagonism between political will and its capacity
to impose its choices and the strategy inscribed within state
apparatuses. We have seen its most aggressive form and also the
most tragic has been the case of the Allende government. But we
have also seen the possibility of a coup detat more quiet, and
more silent which day by day leads to retreats and compromises.

More than 40 years have passed since the last serious debate on
the strategy of the left in regards to the state and government
power. In the 1970s, with the optimism caused by the prospect of

19

Ibid, p. 224.

governments of the left as the first stage of a democratic road to

socialism this debate was important, even though it remained
incomplete.20 And it was Althusser in that period that insisted upon
the excess of force held by the dominant classes:

The relatively stable resultant (reproduced in its stability by the

state) of this confrontation of forces (balance of forces is an
accountant's notion, because it is static) is that what counts is the
dynamic excess of force maintained by the dominant class in the
class struggle. It is this excess of conflictual force, real or potential,
which constitutes energy A, which is subsequently transformed into
power by the state-machine: transformed into right, laws and
norms.21

And we can add : into real obstacles against any effort for a radical
politics. Consequently, the question of the transformation of the
state in relation to the exigencies of the new forms of popular
sovereignty cannot be conceived as a democratisation of the
actual state as Althusser stressed, it is not to add the adjective
democratic to each existing state apparatus. 22 This transformation
must be conceived as the result of a constituent process beyond
the institutional configuration of the dominant classes, a process
20

See Giorgos Kalampokas, Tassos Betzelos et Panagiotis Sotiris, State, Political

Power and Revolution: Althusser, Poulantzas, Balibar and the Debate on the
State, prsentation au Congrs Historical Materialism London, Novembre 2013.
https://www.academia.edu/5106893/State_political_power_and_revolution_Althuss
er_Poulantzas_Balibar_and_the_Debate_on_the_State_%CE%97%CE
%9C_2013_paper_
21 Louis Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter, London: Verso, 2006, p. 109.
22 Louis Althusser, 22me congrs, Paris: Maspero, 1977, p. 54.

that must appeal, in the process of elaborating a new constitution to

the initiatives and propositions from the movements. With new
forms of democratic participation at all levels, with the introduction,
of new forms of social control, with the recognition of practices of
self-management, with the imposition of limits to the right of
property, with new forms of democratic control and transparency
regarding the functioning of repressive apparatuses.23

That is why we can say that one of the problems Syriza government
is exactly this lack of will to initiate a process of institutional
transformation. In contrast, what we observe is the acceptance, as
absolute limit, of the current version of legality, which includes the
European legality and the recycling of political personnel from
systemic parties and in particular PASOK.

Although this profound transformation of the institutional tissue of

the state is indispensable, at the same time it is not enough. Faces
with the excess of force of the dominant classes that is already
inscribed in the materiality of the contemporary state, we need an
excess of force from the part of the subaltern classes. The existence
of autonomous radical movements, the refusal of any stateinstitutionalisation-

of

the

autonomous

of

popular

forms

movements,

the

organisation

expansion

and

of

of

counter-

institutions of peoples (counter)power, are more necessary when

23

See Marta Harnecker, Rebuilding the Left, Londres : Zed, 2007.

facing a government of the left, even if, as Poulantzas stressed, this

also means an irreducible tension between the workers parties and
social movements, as necessary condition of the transition to
democratic socialism.24 In 1978 Althusser in an interview with
Rossana Rossanda referred to the big debate in the European
communist left on the possibility of left-wing government by
stressing

that

the

fact

that

class

struggle

(bourgeois

and

proletarian) has the state as a stake (here and now) by no means

does it mean that we must define politics in relation to the state.25
It is exactly this new practice of politics that Althusser referred to,
that remains today one of the biggest challenges for the left. We can
also formulate this in the form of a question: what practice of
politics is more suitable to a new form of popular sovereignty? It is
also the question of a new relation between the parties of the left
and the state, what Althusser designated as the position that even if
the parties of the left arrive at governmental power, they cannot be
parties of government26, but must have an altogether different
'political practice'27 than bourgeois parties.

It is exactly this new practice of politics combined with a program of

ruptures, a radical conception of popular sovereignty and also the
unleashing of an experimentation with a new developmental

24

Nicos Poulantzas, Repres, Paris: Maspero / Dialectiques, p. 177.

Louis Althusser, Solitude de Machiavel, Paris, PUF, 1998, p. 287.
26 Louis Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism, London : Verso, 2014, p.
225..
27 Ibid, p. 236
25

paradigm (or even a form of de-growth), based upon the

experiences of collective struggles and the collective intelligence,
accompanied with new forms of mass politicisation, of a new mass
political intellectuality that can transform current dynamic and class
alliances into a new historical bloc.28

Conclusion
Did make this theoretical detour only in order to demonstrate the
impossibility of change in Greece or the incapacity of Syriza to
direct, in the sense that Gramsci used to give to this term, the
process of the formation of a new historical bloc? No! I speak in the
name of the possibility opened by a movement without precedent,
in the name of the potential to transform Greece into the first weak
link in the chain of the European Union, in the name of the
potentiality of another road, another paradigm for Greek society. For
a strategy of ruptures with debt, the Eurozone, the EU. For a strong
and militant movement. For a dialectic between government and
popular

mobilisation.

For

an

attempt

to

avoid

defeat

and

humiliation. For an effort to offer an example that is needed by all

movements in Europe and to create, to use Spinozist terminology,
new common notions of effective struggle. For the Greek radical left
the challenge is not simple and not principally to be a left
opposition to Syriza, although this is useful in a political landscape
28

On this see Panagiotis Sotiris, Gramsci et la stratgie de la gauche

contemporaine : le bloc historique comme concept stratgique , Priode,
http://revueperiode.net/gramsci-et-la-strategie-de-la-gauche-contemporaine-lebloc-historique-comme-concept-strategique/.

where every opposition to Syriza comes from the right. The

challenge is to elaborate a left alternative, to transform the strategy
of rupture and of democratic recuperation of sovereignty into an
everyday political practice and experimentation, by proposing,
against the utopia of progressive management of the contemporary
social and political configuration, the necessity of a new dialectics
between radical governance and mass mobilisation.

I started this presentation by speaking about hope. We know that for

Spinoza hope and fear cannot by themselves be good affects. 29
Perhaps this is the road we must choose. Beyond hope as a
investment in the possibility of having concrete result by simply
appealing to moral exigencies in face of the cynicism of European
elites. But also beyond the fear that the rupture is impossible and
irrational. With the fortitude and the generosity 30, the rationality and
the intelligence of a people in struggle to create a new future!

29
30

Ethics, IVp47.
Ethics, Vp41 amd 41s.